EMC Launches Centera Ushers in New Era of Content Addressed Storage

New York, - April 29, 2002 -

EMC Corporation, the world leader in information storage, today delivered a major advancement for the online storage, management and access to more than 50% of the world's newly created data. Ushering in a new era of "content-addressed storage" (CAS), the company introduced EMC Centera™, an entirely new software-driven, online storage architecture designed from the ground up to address the unique information storage requirements of long-lasting, unchanging objects – or "fixed content" – such as electronic documents, digital x-rays, digital MRIs, movies, e-mail, check images and broadcast content.

By storing fixed content online with EMC Centera, businesses and government agencies can generate new revenue streams and reap new levels of value from their information assets for years and decades, while scaling from single-digit terabytes to petabytes with virtually no increase in complexity. The world's first CAS solution, EMC Centera employs industry-first content-based addressing software that simplifies management, reduces costs, ensures content uniqueness, and delivers the scalability needed for terabyte- to petabyte-level fixed content requirements.

In addition, more than 30 companies representing many of the world's most content-intensive applications have endorsed this groundbreaking new solution from EMC. A dozen of those companies have announced immediate or near-term availability of their applications integrated with EMC Centera (see separate releases). Centera partners include: Agfa HealthCare, AMICAS, Artesia, Avid, Avalon, BakBone, BancTec, Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, CommVault, Computer Science Corporation, Connected, Documentum, FileTek, Front Porch Digital, Fujitsu, Gauss, Hummingbird , IXOS, J&B Software, Kodak Medical Imaging, KPMG, KVS, Legato, Merge Technologies, Mobius, NICE Systems, OTG, Quest Software, Sarnoff, Scientific Software, Storigen Systems, TowerTech and Virage.

Joe Tucci, EMC President and CEO, said, "Leaders can never be satisfied solely with the enhancement of existing approaches. Once again, we are doing what our customers have come to expect from EMC — seeing around the corner and anticipating, rather than simply reacting to the needs of our information-driven world. In our constant search for better ways to manage the volumes of information that continue to inundate organizations and individuals, it's become clear that fixed content demands a unique approach. In the absence of a solution specifically designed to address this need, EMC created Centera. Today's announcement marks another major milestone in the most aggressive roll-out of new products and capabilities in EMC's history."

Jim Rothnie, EMC Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, said, "Customers have learned the hard way that simply retrofitting existing technologies to handle fixed content is a short-term and sub-optimal approach at best. EMC designed Centera to approach this problem from the ground up, resulting in a solution optimized for the fixed-content requirements of long-term retention, speed of access, petabyte scalability, application integration and ease of management."

Based on data in a study conducted by the University of California at Berkeley, information continues to double every year and more than 50% of all new digital information is fixed content.

Steve Duplessie, co-founder of Enterprise Storage Group, said, "Fixed content represents the next great paradigm shift for users of information technology. This shift will happen bigger and faster than even the relational database phenomenon that occurred throughout the '90s. EMC is once again out in front of the trend, with new products and partnerships, aiming to take advantage of the next wave while others are still trying to catch up to the last one."

Pat Lynch, President & CEO of Sector, Inc., a subsidiary of the Securities Industry Automation Corporation (SIAC) and a leading managed services provider, said, "The EMC Centera solution will enable us to bring online virtually all of our critical internal document images. Centera is the first storage solution aimed squarely at the needs of these fixed-content assets. In addition to bringing tremendous value to our data center operations, Centera will also serve as the base storage infrastructure for an entirely new class of Sector's managed service offerings."

Software-Driven Intelligence and Automation

As the world's first CAS solution, EMC Centera employs a first-of-its-kind, content-based addressing system, simplifying management, ensuring content uniqueness, and delivering the scalability needed for terabyte- to petabyte-level fixed content requirements. While location-based methods found in network-attached storage (NAS) and storage-area networks (SAN) are optimized for frequently changing data, content-based addressing is specifically designed for the requirements of fixed content.

With the location-based addressing schemes found in NAS, SAN, direct-attached storage (DAS), as well as tape and optical solutions, information is tracked based on its physical location. Using these approaches, complexity escalates as the scale increases. Content-based addressing found in Centera eliminates the need for applications to understand and manage the physical location of information while introducing virtually no complexity, regardless of scale, from single-digit terabytes to petabytes under EMC Centera management.

The Centera software - CentraStar™ - incorporates a content addressing intelligence that calculates a unique address based on the actual content of every stored object. This unique digital fingerprint serves as a permanent and portable "claim check" that applications use to retrieve objects. Retrieval requires no knowledge of the storage environment or physical location of the objects. This method simplifies the task of developing Centera-integrated applications and accessing and managing huge numbers of objects, and ensures verifiable accuracy of the content for data integrity, authentication and other purposes.

In addition to content addressing, CentraStar delivers critical features for large-scale deployments including self-management, auto-configuration, self-healing, non-disruptive maintenance and upgrades, and content replication.

EMC Centera is available immediately. List price begins at $101,500 for Centera hardware and $103,200 for Centera software, representing $204,700 for a 5-terabyte protected (10 terabytes raw capacity) total system configuration. Centera implementations scale from 5 terabytes (protected) to more than one petabyte, in 2.5-terabyte increments. Centera is available directly from EMC for customers with in-house application development capabilities, and through the large and increasing number of EMC Centera partners providing their own content management solutions across a wide range of industries.

EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC) is the world leader in information storage systems, software, networks and services, providing the information infrastructure for a connected world. Information about EMC's products and services can be found at www.EMC.com.